Resisting bedtime

Between now and January 20, 2025, Joe Biden will tell a bedtime story for democracy in the United States. He will tuck us in, and Kamala Harris will kiss us on the forehead. Democrats in Congress will give us some warm milk with a sedative in it, and they will put democracy to sleep. They will do this knowing full well that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are waiting in the hallway with a pillow and the intention of smothering democracy once and for all. 

This future is not inevitable, but it is likely. Bedtime for democracy is a framework through which we can examine current events. Ask yourself: is this politician or pundit pacifying us? Are they assuming Trump will be restrained by laws or courts or norms that clearly won’t restrain him? Are they encouraging us to forget how the first week of the first Trump presidency went? If so, don’t drink that warm milk. Ignore that bedtime story. Get ready to fight the pillowman. 

For months, team Harris has been warning us about the threat to democracy presented by Donald Trump. They were probably just trying to get our money and our votes, but also, they weren’t wrong. Democracy has been in decline in this country for decades, and centrist Democrats have been active participants in its erosion the whole time. Trump is just here to finish off a project that corporate controlled politicians in both parties have been working on. 

In 2017 people in the US donated a lot of money, time and resources to things that did not work, and will work even less in 2025. The ACLU and Planned Parenthood took our money in 2017, and they failed to protect civil liberties and abortion access. In the years following, they continued to take our money, leveraging fear of Trump to open our pocketbooks, and they continued to fail. The Democratic Party also took our money, stoking fear even more aggressively, and also failed even more spectacularly. The pillowman will not be deterred by non-profits, by speeches or compromises with his loyal opposition on the floor of the legislature. Laws do not matter to fascist regimes. What happens next will be determined in the streets. We have to act, and we have to act locally. 

Just as Trump will blithely run the country and economy into the ground, emboldened Wisconsin Republicans will step all over disheartened Democrats and will decimate Wisconsin starting with Milwaukee. The future is bleak for everyone, but fascists will first scapegoat only some of us. We have two tasks before us. The first is to defend everyone and anyone in the fascist crosshairs. The second is to eject corporate Democrats and other bedtime-story-telling losers from the conversation, so that we can build a true political opposition on the left. 

Community defense

On a national level, the people at It Could Happen Here (ICHH) outlined a defense-based approach in their excellent roundtable discussion on November 6. Since then, they have gone in depth on  describing who and what issues Trump and his team will target first: migrants and trans people. They will undoubtedly address reproductive freedom, Palestinian solidarity, and many other flashpoints in future episodes of their daily show.  

In the coming weeks, Milwaukee Beagle hopes to follow suit, but with local specificity. We will identify and highlight local organizations and projects that defend frontline communities. We will examine and sort the organizations that are working to directly, materially bolster our defenses from those that are wasting resources on lobbying politicians and telling bedtime stories. We are an all-volunteer project, led by a small group of friends who are committed to this struggle beyond just putting words together, so don’t expect too much. If there is a gap during the most intense times, trust it is because we are in the streets and in the struggles ourselves. We are always looking for worthy contributions from others. 

Let’s create a future where every time ICE comes to deport someone, or the cops come to arrest an abortion doctor or trans health provider, they are met with dozens of Milwaukeeans who are ready to get arrested alongside their target. If the scenario plays out well, maybe we’ll take the wheels off that vehicle and convince the arresting officers to take off their badges and rejoin humanity. If you aren’t ready and willing to be arrested defending our community, then be ready to donate to bail and legal defense funds for those who are. And if you’re not ready for either, then your task is to get yourself ready, because those are the things that will primarily be needed if we are going to survive. 

I know, direct action is a scary thing to consider, and one of the bedtime stories we’ve been told many, many times is that aggressive self-defense invites and justifies repression. This is simply not true, and it absolves repressive forces of culpability. Repression cares more about effectiveness than legality. If we intend to be effective in the defense of our neighbors, we will be targeted by police whether we remain lawful or not. Even if they can’t make charges stick, dragging some of us to court on bullshit stops or at least slows down whatever organizing we are doing.

Eliminating False Solutions

It is imperative that we understand why Harris lost, and why the opportunity to flip the state assembly was largely squandered. We must stop listening to the people who let those things happen. If the Democratic Party in Wisconsin has a future, it is with the socialist caucus and left populist candidates. Corporate centrists will continue failing until they leave the party in ruins. 

There are not adequate legislative responses to fascism. Immigration needs deportation resistance, legal defense, paperwrenching, not lobbying against anti-immigrant legislation. Also, the corporate Democrats already abandoned immigrants, and will undoubtedly do so again. Same goes for trans people, Muslims, Palestinians, criminalized and incarcerated people, police-targeted communities of color, and many others. Centrist politicians are simply not trustworthy against racism and fascism. 

We at Milwaukee Beagle will also continue holding establishment politicians to account. When the county board and common council pass budgets that expand police force and funding, they are adding deadly stuffing to the part of Trump’s pillow that will smother Milwaukee. When Ann Jacobs flings disgusting accusations around, she distracts us from recognizing that support for genocide is not only wrong, it is unpopular, and a major part of how Trump won. When Evers makes “bipartisan” compromises with fascist Republicans, he is forcing Milwaukee to pay for our coming devastation.

We need to be cautious about politicians who aspire to be junior partners in the coming fascist regime. Anyone right of Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, or the Wisconsin Assembly Socialist Caucus deserves a primary challenge. Too many Democrats put business interests over human interests, and that creates a fertile ground for fascist manipulation and MAGA recruiting. As we described during the primaries, resisting fascism requires a people’s party, an anti-business party. If those values don’t take hold of the Democratic Party, it will continue to fail and soon be replaced by a third party.

At the same time, we should be wary of left authoritarian cults. These groups see blood in the water and are recruiting hard right now, they will contribute to important mobilizations,  but their focus is often purely on building their membership base and high-pressuring members for dues money that then filters toward egomaniacal leaders at the top. Instead, we will be highlighting the least hierarchical groups we can find. Groups that put time and energy directly into winnable campaigns or mutual aid projects reduce harm and help build a generalized capacity for robust communities of resistance, rather than rigid organizations who spend half their time competing with each other.  ICHH talked about creating assemblies that are “not decision-making bodies, but information-sharing bodies”. The role of ushering people toward the work that best suits them is a role we would love Milwaukee Beagle to have.

Another thing to be wary of is silver linings. Remember, Nixon signed the clean water act. There are countless reforms that were cynically held up by fascist Republicans for years. Some of those reforms may come, now that Trump and Vos can take credit for them. Netanyahu will probably stop escalating and may even settle for peace that slows his genocide back down to aparteid now that he got the president he wanted. State Republicans might stop blocking medicaid expansion, or cannibis legalization now that they have leverage to extract other gains from Governor Evers. More likely they’ll wait until they beat him in 2026. Republicans should never be given credit for reforms they only stopped blocking when it was politically beneficial to them. 

There are surely frightening and despicable times ahead. Nothing we can do will completely prevent Trump and his misogynist christian nationalist party from causing great harm. We also should expect MAGA to never again give up power as peacefully as they did on January 6, 2021. There will surely be more hardship, violence and death, but there are also actions we can take to make the MAGA era as brief, disorganized, and unsuccessful as possible.